Though what they're doing is organizing volunteers on a massive scale — they have steered just more than 6,000 volunteers to Washington residents in need since the EF-4 tornado hit Nov. 17, destroying or severely damaging more than 1,000 homes — their base of operations is quite small.

The church’s office is an old farmhouse on the north side of town. The house shares its lot with a standard aluminum-sided barn. “The barn was rather empty before the storm hit,” Davidson said.

Now, a dozen wheelbarrows, scores of rakes and picks, dozens of shovels and countless other cleanup tools fill the barn almost to capacity. Most of the equipment has been donated, according to Davidson, and some of the equipment has been bought by the tornado fund that Bethany Church started soon after the tornado hit.

“With our tornado fund, we can go buy any particular tool needed,” Davidson said. “Oh, we don’t have a sledgehammer? Lets go buy a sledgehammer. We can do that.”

Megan Simpson, a volunteer from Morton, was the benefactor of one of the more recent sledgehammer purchases as she helped a homeowner finish off a partially destroyed cement garage. “After I was done using the sledgehammer, I had gotten a lot of aggression out,” Simpson said with a laugh. “Afterwards, my body did kind of hurt. My body had never used muscles like that, but it was still really fun and really worth it.”

The travel time between Simpson’s hometown and Washington was only 13 minutes, so the trip isn’t too daunting. That’s not true for others. “We’ve had groups from Rochester, New York come here to help. We’ve had 135 high schoolers from Missouri show up on charter buses,” Davidson said. “These groups usually stay a week and do a lot to help homeowners clean up.”

“You could see houses popping up, people rebuilding. It gives the whole place a glimmer of hope,” Simpson said. “It’s a great thing to be a part of.”

The whole volunteering process is streamlined through the church’s farmhouse office. Washington citizens call in for help and their information is entered into the church’s database. Volunteers that want to help just call in and are given an open time either on a Thursday, Friday or a Saturday, or an entire week of volunteer time if they want.

A Bethany volunteer like P.J. Polly handles these calls and hands out assignments to volunteers all in the church office’s command center: a big table in the building’s kitchen.

“Friday afternoon is P.J.’s time. Tomorrow morning, it’s someone else’s,” Davidson said. “We don’t have the staff to do this all ourselves. To organize all the volunteers, we need volunteers ourselves.”

While Davidson may not have invented the idea of this streamlined volunteer organizing effort, he did see such a thing in action and tailor it to his hometown’s needs.

“I had gone down to volunteer after Katrina hit, down to Slidel, Louisiana. First Baptist Church in Slidell had become the base for volunteers after FEMA and everyone else left New Orleans,” Davidson said. “I was riding my bike home from Five Points when it came to me: we can do this.”

Davidson credits God’s grace and word of mouth as the keys to the volunteering effort going smoothly since the week the tornado hit. Because of its well-oiled ways, the church has volunteers booked until August.

“We will never turn away the help,” Davidson said. “We’re going to have to decide how much further to schedule in the next coming months. It would be great to have the whole town cleaned up by August, but you never know.”

Seeing the city slowly cleaned up has helped volunteers and Bethany move forward, but some days are hard. Organizing everything may seem difficult and the volunteer’s jobs may be physically challenging, but Davidson and his church have a saying for those days. “Hard is not bad, it’s just hard,” Davidson said. “God never said anything bad about hard work.”

Zach Berg can be reached at zberg@pjstar.com or 686-3257. Follow him on Twitter @ZacharyBerg.